It's been just over a half year since my last posting here. A quick status update...
In March I upgraded my trusty old desktop PC to a new laptop with a dual-core Pentium T4300 at 2.1 GHz. In the process of migrating my data I broke my old P-ATA hard disk :-(
The breakage was very minor (a broken connector lead) and seemed to be fixable with some soldering, but it took me nearly two months to get around to obtaining the proper cable and connector. Then I quickly made a full copy to a new S-ATA hard disk and breathed a sigh of relief.
I did have a backup but it was months old and did not include my most recent CD-i Emulator work, so I really wanted the up-to-date data.
However, as Charles commented on my previous entry, Visual Studio 6 has problems working under Windows 7. That demoralized me such that I left it hanging for a few months more. My older CD-i Emulator development builds didn't even work under Win7 :-(
Yesterday I finally got around to doing a full restore from the backup disk to my laptop and I also installed Visual Studio 2010 just to take a look at it.
Having done that, I realized that I could try building CD-i Emulator again!
I just finished doing that, and after finding the single source line that generated the 300+ errors I got on the first build, it appears that I now again have a working development build of the most recent CD-i Emulator, optimistically labeled v0.5.3-beta1. It seems to run like a charm, doing 50/50 frames on non-FMV titles and even 34/50 on my FMV test cases. Wow!
Using Visual Studio 2010 means that the minimum system requirement is now Windows XP, as earlier Windows versions are no longer supported as C++ build targets. But I don't think that should really be a problem.
At the end of next month it will be five years since the original CD-i Emulator v0.5.2 public release; I'm hoping to release 0.5.3-beta1 before that.
Please bear with me...
